During the hot nights they sleep out in the open
What keeps me up at night is me myself. That’s a simple beginning to the explanation. At the beginning: I slept like the proverbial baby since I actually was a baby first sleeping through the night up until I was sixteen years old, there or thereabouts.
At that time: melodrama with my mother of the most toxic sort. We eventually fought each other so hard that we gave ourselves semi-permanent injuries: she developed an ulcer, I developed a hiatal hernia which in later life metamorphosed into esophageal cancer. Only then did I let it go: the anger. I hadn’t known before that that it could be done. It had simply never occurred to me. I finally, then, learned a basic mental fact as elemental as that 1 + 1 = 2. It took Bertrand Russell about 100 pages of tightly reasoned mathematical logic to establish that small arithmetical fact; I intend to be less picky on this than Bertrand Russell was. That also lets me out of having to try to read his works.
But I digress: it was in those late high-school years that I learned insomnia. I’d wake in a nervous jangle at five in the morning, four, three thirty. I would close my eyes and try to force sleep to come back to me, but I inevitably lay there, still, staring for an hour or two until it was ten before seven, and my father came to wake me for school. Favored method of waking daughter: collect daughter’s cat from the attic stairs where it slept, and dump cat on top of sleeping daughter. Dad always woke up early because he had been in the Army and the National Guard for eighteen years. Waking early was a sign of distinction, and he took great pride in it.
The fatigue of the sleepless night only really hit me in the couple of moments after my cat would land on top of me. Then it was dressing in my uniform, breakfast of toast or cereal and always tea, and a half hour drive to school. I felt safe at school and could have slept nicely there, were it not for the classes and the attendance taken.
After heading off to college and life in a completely different time zone from my parents, I slept almost all my nights through, even though I was then still the same bundle of nerves and confusion that so many girls are then. One or two episodes of waking early with the “What am I going to do with my life?” running through my brain, and then I slept all night like the proverbial normal person.
I’m still suspicious of the night, though, so I tend to stay up late, as if not to let it catch me off guard.
white pebble 